


Special

by Lady Belarvs (fightthosefairies)



Category: Fandom: Heroes
Genre: Gen, M/M, brainnnnns, first-person pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-01
Updated: 2013-07-01
Packaged: 2017-12-16 17:38:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/864777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fightthosefairies/pseuds/Lady%20Belarvs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While on the road with Mohinder, Sylar ruminates on the nature of his connection to the young professor and the nature of his evolutionary compulsion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Special

I wanted to be a part of something.

For once, I wanted to be accepted. By someone, anyone. You would have done just as well as another person. Any other person. At least at the start. 

Seeing the way you looked at me. The way you promised that you'd make sure I was safe. Even though you weren't calling me by my name – just the name of a shell I'd adopted for myself so that I could get close to you – I could still pretend and wonder, too, if the real Zane would feel that chilled shudder of want for you.

But Zane couldn't feel anything anymore and that's as it should be. Someone who wastes his power that way – holing himself up in his home and melting frying pans and telephones - doesn't deserve to keep it. He probably thought he was possessed by some demon. 

And he was... well, after I showed up on his doorstep that day.

But I don't think that's something you will ever truly understand, will you, Mohinder. That black wanting overwhelming your soul and pushing you to take, to risk, to lie – washing up over you and blotting out any shred of humanity or sapience -- anything to have what you need. 

And you don't need anything, do you? No, you don't need anything. 

You live in your dead father's apartment; drinking his tea, driving his taxi, continuing his research, wrestling against the same bad dreams and disappointments. You're living someone else's life, too, just like me. If you were truly honest with yourself, you'd see that. You and I aren't as different as you think we are. We have more in common than you could ever imagine, Mohinder. Your father doubted it, doubted me – he didn't think there was anything special about me – but you don't. You look at me and see my potential, you see what I can do for you, how I can help. And I want to help you. 

Because maybe, just maybe... the purity of purpose that drives you might erase the blackness from inside me.

People are so much more complicated than timepieces – so many signals to interpret, so many messy and inconvenient interactions to endure, subtle body language and idiosyncrasies to be considered. Timepieces are different. There is such unspeakable beauty in their simplicity, their orderliness. A second in North America is a second in Peru or Rome or Germany. All countries have their own currencies, laws, borders, but time is above the lamentable machinations and politicking of men. A second is a second is a second. The time zone might change, but that one tick is always the same. Universal.

Even now while I'm on the road with you I find myself missing my -- the shop in spite of myself. The tranquility of an otherwise perfectly silent space filled with the precise ticktickticktick of all of my carefully assembled and restored pieces lining the walls. Each clock wound just so and counting away the seconds – each one with its own personality and timber, like instruments in their respective sections of an orchestra. I'd be able to listen and tell if a clock or chronometer was even a tenth of a second off. It was my gift. My mother abandoned all hope for me after I decided to keep the shop open after my father passed away. Or, I should say, she abandoned all hope of me ever finding a nice girl and settling down so that I could give her grandchildren. Maybe they would succeed in all the ways that I'd failed her. Which was every way and always.

With my timepieces, I could open them up and look inside and see where the problems were. A spring too loose, a wheel that had been bent accidentally during its manufacture. Most of the time, I could pinpoint a problem in a piece without even opening it. People, though, weren't nearly so easy to understand. When my mother was angry at me, I couldn't take her apart to find her wheels or see if her springs weren't tight enough. When she was disappointed, I couldn't just put on my loupe and prod and tinker until she was better again. But I learned. I learned to fix her – and the others – soon enough. 

Being her child is like shouting into this vast abyss every day of my life. Screaming my identity and my worth out until I'm hoarse and it's never, never enough and then the next day comes and I do it all over again. Waiting for the moment when the void will be filled, the abyss will stop clawing at me and she'll finally be happy with the son she has rather than the son she always dreamed of. Most of the time I just find myself hoping that I can come to terms with the fact that it will never happen and still be okay with it.

All of us have a destiny, Mohinder. Your father taught me that. And I believe that it's my destiny to liberate and elevate the abilities of others in order to do truly great things. Dale Smither squandered her gift, drowning it out with rap music – can't you see how wrong that is, Mohinder? Can't you understand how perverse a thing it is, to have such a tremendous power and not utilize it? Far more perverse than anything I ever did to her or any of the others, I can assure you.

All things kill. Hyenas converge on a wounded zebra and tear it to pieces; birds push their newly hatched offspring out of the nest, sending them plummeting to their deaths on the forest floor below. What makes what I do so very different from that? Nature is a cruel thing and evolution is merciless. Why should it be any less so with humans? With me?

Freshly evolved things crawled out of the ooze and there were other things there waiting for them when they finally set foot on dusty earth. Things with teeth and claws. They were meat, prey... fuel. 

Meat is meat, whether it's dripping sticky red with coppery blood or pulsing alive with thoughts and imagination and power. The first mouthful was... a revelation. I didn't even get sick to my stomach. Because it was right. It was right for me to have that power – power that Brian Davis wanted to get rid of, wanted to give away like you would give away last year's ill-fitting winter coat to the Salvation Army. That power was meant to be mine. When I sat there across from your father and showed him – showed him what I could do and that I wasn't afraid – I felt it. It was always meant to be mine. 

I am the hyena with gnashing jaws wedged open wide with my kill. I'm the flood that sweeps through the backwaters, gutting churches and carving away houses from their foundations. I am the righteously sharpened edge and blood-thirsty tip of the blade that open all so that nothing is ever a secret again.

I am the good and devoted son you wish you were, the disappointment of a child you believed yourself to be, I am every lie and dirty trick and uncharitable thought you think. I am the detached, unflinching scientist you could never have the guts to be. I am the special boy who knows, just as you do, what it means to be their parents' fondest regret. 

I am the deadly reminder that there but for the grace of God... 

The more I think about it, the more I realize, Mohinder... you don't hate me because of what I've done, although I have done things and they have been horrible. You don't despise my motivations, although they are, without a doubt, loathsome. You hate me because you know that you could be me. 

And part of you longs for that.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm gathering together a lot of my fics from various fandoms that have been scattered all over the internet for years. This is one of those fics.


End file.
